


The Terminus of Prayer

by Cadhla



Series: A Travelogue for Exiles [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 20:54:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5555003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/pseuds/Cadhla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Parting of the Ways" remixed from all the angles; a word for wood and a word for world that are the same, and the word for both is "London"...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Terminus of Prayer

Look and remember. Look upon this sky;  
Look deep and deep into the sea-clean air,  
The unconfined, the terminus of prayer.  
Speak now and speak into the hallowed dome.  
What do you hear? What does the sky reply?  
_The heavens are taken: this is not your home._

\-- Karl Shapiro, "A Travelogue for Exiles."

*

_Once upon a time..._

Once upon a time there was a little blonde girl in a red jacket who lived at the edge of an enchanted forest, in the days when the word for world and the word for wood were the same, and the word for both of them was "London." And she was clever, this girl, she was cunning and she was wise, but she'd never looked beyond the steel and concrete trees that were her home, never needed to, never _wanted_ to--or at least that was what she told herself when she pulled her hood up over her head to block out the sight of the stars overhead and went trudging home at the end of every day, carrying bread and wine for her mother, keeping her feet firmly onto the path. Little Red Riding Hood in the modern age, shopgirl and slacker, growing up, growing stale, growing old and growing into nothing but a memory as time rushed around her like a river that no ferryman could ever try or tame.

Once upon a time there was a not-so-little blonde woman, still in a red jacket, who met a madman, a wizard, a poet, and a thief, and all of them were one man, one man and the same man, and he ran into her life like a hurricane, and he blew all her safe little houses down. She might have called him the Big Bad Wolf, except that he saved her so completely that she didn't even know that she was being saved; not until the wood and the world were so far behind her that they might as well have been a fairy tale, something out of an old book that she'd read once, and then forgotten. If he was anything, he was her woodcutter, slicing open the belly of the beast her life had been, pulling her out into the light, out into the light of something, well, better, something she'd never have seen on her own.

Once upon a time they went out into something bigger, brighter, better, something more important than anything she'd ever been or seen or done on her own, and she touched the stars, she did, that girl in the red hood, she held them in the palm of her hand, watched them burning, learned their names. She cradled worlds in the comfort of her regard, and she learned; she learned that memory is like that river, that sometimes all you can do is remember things, hold them, keep them, make moments live a little longer than the time that they were given. She remembers watching the world die. She remembers a woman braver than her station gave her any reason to be. She remembers a little boy who lost his mother, a planet frozen in forever-ice, a world where the very stones sang songs to her...she remembers everything. She has to. No one else is going to do it for her, and the Big Bad Wolf is close upon her trail, following, following, always following, always waiting for the moment when--

The moment when--

Things are going to change.

The wolf is coming out of the woods, and the word for wood and the word for world aren't the same anymore--maybe they were never the same to begin with--and she doesn't want to believe that her story, this story, the story she belongs to, she doesn't want to believe that it could end, won't let herself believe in ever after, won't turn around, won't open her eyes, won't see. She refuses. But the wolf is coming closer all the time, and Rose Tyler, not so little, not so hooded now, she knows it won't be long before she last page turns.

When the TARDIS doors close with the Doctor on the other side, his jack-o-lantern grin flickering into darkness like a candle that's been blown out (and she can't see it, but she knows that's what's happening, because she knows the seriousness, the starkness, that hides under the lunatic smiles), she knows that her denials didn't do her any good, not a single scrap of it, because things are changing anyway. The wolf is here. The wolf has been here all along.

Rose beats her fists against the walls of the world, and screams defiance at happy ever after. Every word sounds like his name.

Give her enough time, and it'll just sound like screaming.

*

He's always been good at leaving them behind.

There's a sort of art to it; one he mastered before leaving Gallifrey, during the slippery years of his youth, when it was all dodging responsibility and dodging rules and generally just dodging anything he didn't feel like dealing with at the time. Dodging respectability is what it really all came down to--staying simple and careless, so that they'd never actually expect anything of him, or ask him to be anything greater than he was. Unlike some, he never wanted to be a god, or a hero, or a legend. He just wanted to be the Doctor, to see what was and enjoy the time that he was given, because even for a Time Lord, whose life could span more moments than a human mind could ever grasp, that time was so very, very short. Time was forever. Every son and daughter of Gallifrey knew that before they were out of the cradle; time is forever, and you are not. If he wasn't going to live forever, he was going to live free. So he learned to slip away. He made abandonment an art.

"Rose Tyler, you're brilliant," he says, and he means it in every sense of the word, even the ones she can't hear, won't hear, the ones he'll never tell her about. You're smart, Rose, smarter than your time period, your race, your heritage; smart enough to have come with me when I asked. You're clever, Rose, for all that you're a stupid ape like all the rest; you're not the first one I've loved, and you won't be the last, but right now, you're the one that matters. You're brilliant, Rose, you burn on the horizon like a star, and that's why I chose you, why I chose them all. Because you burn so briefly and so brightly, and you remind me of how much the universe has to lose--how much it loses every second of the day.

 _Burn brightly. Be brilliant. Do that for me?_ he asks her silently, and he leaves her at the console, his little speck of stardust standing in the spot where so many other stars have stood, and he walks outside, and the doors swing shut behind him.

Does she realize what he's doing when the engines start, he wonders, does she understand that for once, he's not leaving his Companion behind--that this time, it's the other way around? He's the one left standing there, watching as the TARDIS fades away, with all its yesterdays and tomorrows safely locked away behind a facade of blue paint, weathered wood, promised safety, promised time. He's the one that's been left behind to face the story ending, today, here, right now.

He never asked for responsibility. It just followed him home like a cat that wanted to come in out of the rain, all softness and big glowing eyes, and by the time he realized what he'd done, he'd let it inside, given it a dish of cream, named it, and allowed himself to start to care. That's the trouble with caring. One minute you're as free as a bird, racing through the timestream in a stolen ship, the universe spread out before you like a glorious banquet, all you can eat, forever, and the next minute you're the celestial equivalent of a crazy old cat lady, never quite able to sleep without checking the kittens, filling the food dishes, and scooping the messes out of the litter pan.

At least universes don't shed on the laundry quite as much. Although they did show a dismaying tendency to sit down on whatever it was that you were trying to read.

He's the last son of Gallifrey, the one who ran away, the coward who survived. He's buried himself nine times over, now, buried the grandfather, the cynic, the dandy, the fool, the innocent, the clown, the wizard, and the supplicant. What was he this time, with all that in his past? The soldier, he supposes, or the storyteller. The teacher.

The woodcutter at the end of the world.

There's work left to do--there's always work left to do, that's the thing about work, it doesn't let you off just because the world has decided to start ending--and so he turns away from the spot where his future used to stand, and he goes back to doing what he's always done, when you got past the flippancy and the flight. He goes back to doing what needs to be done.

Maybe there's no better memorial than that.

Maybe there's no better memorial for any of them.

*

So this is what it's like to know that you're going to die.

Funny. He always thought that it would be a little bit more, well, surprising. All full of regrets for the things you didn't do, the punches you didn't throw, the drinks you didn't drink, the dances that you decided to sit out on. That's what it was like before, with a bomb in the cockpit getting ready to blow him out of the sky. All regrets and pointless might-have-beens.

But this isn't surprising at all. He's getting ready to face off against an army out of a kiddie's bedtime story, with nothing to back him up but a little band of people who think this is some new sort of game. Somewhere up above him, a man who could be a god if he wanted to is building a doomsday machine from a bad pulp novel, all stupid gadgets and winning smile, with Rose, Rose, beautiful Rose, the mad scientist's gorgeous daughter, standing right there beside him, cheering as he destroys the world. How could he _not_ know that he's about to die? Jack is the Prince of Hubris, but he's never been _stupid_. Death is coming closer every second, like the boogeyman slipping out of the closet just as soon as the lights click off. And it's anything but a surprise.

In a way, he's a little bit relieved, because really, deep down--below the bravado and the cowardice and the flirtation and everything but Jack, Jack himself, Captain Jack Harkness, who flew through time and danced with people who died before he was ever conceived of--he almost thinks of himself as dead already. Come on, after all; saved from an unexploded German bomb by a crazed Englishman with a big blue box that travels through time and space? A crazed Englishman who travels, mind you, in the company of a gorgeous example of twenty-first century female flesh, all peaches and cream curves, cherry lips and vinegar claws? That's just not possible. Not even if you happen to be Jack Harkness, darling of the beautiful ladies of Madame O'Neil's Interstellar Brothel, only man ever to get a second invitation to one of the Marquis Andromeda's private parties, golden boy...

But it's hard to keep being a legend when you're about to be slaughtered by homicidal pepper pots, and so, regretfully, Jack lets the illusions go. All the stories, all the dances; all that's behind him now. What's left is the gun in his hands, and the people standing with him, and the fact that there's actually no such thing as a good looking corpse. What matters is that you were a man, and you danced well, and you died well. Everything else is just trappings. Everything else is, well...

It's just stories.

He wishes he'd kissed Rose more. More than what, he couldn't say if you asked him, but he wishes he had.

He wishes he'd kissed the Doctor more, too. There was a man who needed to be thoroughly kissed, left gasping, and then kissed a bit more, for good measure. For luck.

He wishes he'd ever bothered to do all that tourist crap that first-time time travelers usually mess around with, meeting his grandparents, watching a Shakespeare production with Shakespeare actually in the cast--the audience of _Hamlet_ on the first night was ninety percent people from a dozen centuries in the future, all of them holding their noses and drinking down history like wine--seeing _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_ before it got dried out and turned into a National Heritage Foundation display, where the lines never changed and there was no life in it at all. All the stupid things he thought were beneath him. He wishes he'd done them, now.

Jack Harkness was a rogue and a liar, and he didn't live the sort of life that gets you into Heaven. But he lived well enough to win a glimpse of it, just him and Rose and the Doctor, hurtling through time, together, perfect. Not for long enough--can that sort of thing ever be long enough?--but for a little while. And now?

Now comes Hell.

Jack squares his shoulders, draws his gun, and turns to face the future.

*

_Once upon a time..._

_I love you. I can let her live._

_I loved you. There will be a price. There always is._

_I will love you yet. The Big Bad Wolf is coming._

_Ever after just means the story isn't done._

_Are you ready?_

_Do you understand me now?_

*

Mickey and her mother are talking, talking, endlessly talking, and it's all just noise; it's all mundanity and nonsense and things that don't matter a bit. Not right now. Because they've never learned to feel the world falling out from under them--it isn't that the world doesn't move when they're around, it's that they just don't _care_ that the world falls away, that stars burn out, that heroes don't always win, that sometimes the story ends before you're done with it, the Bad Wolf comes out of the darkness and eats the woodcutter, and everything ends, and everything dies, and there's just no getting around it, is there? If the Doctor couldn't get away from the inevitability of it all, the sheer _stupidity_ of it all, how can she? She's just a girl.

She doesn't even have her hood anymore.

This used to be enough. She knows that; she looks at the shapes of their words, even if she can't find the meaning under the stupid, stupid noise, and she knows that this used to matter to her, once upon a time, when the word for wood and the word for world were the same, and the word for both of them was 'London'. This used to be enough for her. She used to be able to live here, to live with this, to stay on the path and be good and behave. Once.

But that was before, and the thing about "before" is that it's constant; it's unchangeable. Travel through time and space and here and there just as much as you like, it won't do a damn thing about "before." What was it the Doctor said? As soon as the TARDIS doors open, you're a part of the timestream. Reality just closes in around you, like a rock thrown into a river, and there you go; you're stuck with your very own "before." The one thing that you can't undo.

"Once upon a time" isn't a blessing; it's a curse. It's looking backwards and realizing that you were innocent and happy and dumber than a bag of bricks, and that all of that happened in "before," and you can't go back there, it's a line that can't be crossed. Before. Before the frozen seas, and the woodcutter, and the madman, and the angels. Before she learned how to dance properly, the sort of dancing where you close your eyes and throw your arms out wide, and don't worry about who might be watching you, or what people might think, or what you're going to do tomorrow. The Doctor...Jack...

How can she live here, in a world painted with all the bitter, washed-out colors of "before," where no one dances? She can't. She won't.

Rose Tyler was always a stubborn little girl, and she didn't mellow all that much with age. Faced with the choice between the unbearable and the unbelievable, she'll find another way; that's the only way that this story can go. She's not going to live like this. She won't. "There's nothing left for me here," she says, and she means it in every sense she can imagine, even the ones Mickey can't hear, won't hear, the ones she couldn't explain to him if she was willing to be bothered to try. There's nothing, Mickey, even though I know you love me, even though I know you'd try to make me happy, because I can still feel the world falling out from underneath my feet, and as long as I feel that, we're doomed together, you and I. There's nothing, Mickey, nothing but hours turning into days into nights, weeks, months, years, a lifetime spent linear and pinned down, like a bird that's forgotten how to fly. There's nothing, Mickey, except me dying by inches and hauling you down with me into the darkness that doesn't end, because you'd keep on loving me, you couldn't stop if you tried, and I'd destroy you through your love, before I finished the process of destroying myself.

 _Help me live, Mickey, even if it kills me, because there's nothing for me here but dying a day at a time, and I don't mind being a suicide, but I don't want to be a murderess,_ she begs, and she knows he hears her, under the cutting confusion and pain of the things she said aloud. Sometimes you have to hurt them to make them let you go. The Doctor taught her that.

He taught her more than he understands.

Her mother brings the truck. It may be the last time they ever see each other--they both know that, but then, they've always known that on some level, every day, because the universe is full of hit-and-run drivers, isn't it, people who take corners without looking--but she brings the truck, and the chain holds, and the door opens on forever. Forever and ever and ever and ever and oh, the world is so full of _time_ , all the worlds are so very full of time, there's a word for wood and a word for world, and it's the same word, and the word is _now_.

Now Rose looks into the heart of every before, every tomorrow, every yesterday, today, later, soon, _now_. Now Rose feels the tears beginning, the hot salt seas of Earth running down cheeks tanned by alien suns, washing through the mingled dust of tomorrow and today. Now Rose sees them all, all those other girls, all the children of Gallifrey, all that's been lost, all that's been found.

_Now._

A voice that isn't, a voice that always was, asks her, _Do you understand?_

Mute with the blazing brightness of the future, dizzied by the feeling of the world falling out from underneath her feet, Rose Tyler can only nod, and breathe deeply, and finally let the Big Bad Wolf inside.

*

He can't do it.

Hand on the trigger, he can't do it. It's just like before--is anything ever really new?--and he can't do it. He can't become the wrathful devil to the God of the Daleks. Even if it means that they're avenged. Even if it means he wins. Because there are too many Jacks, too many Lyndas with their stupid, vestigial "y"s, too many Roses in their gardens who might have a chance, even in a world where the Daleks reign supreme. Death is the end of chances. Death has followed him for all his long and wasted life, and he refuses, here at the end of it, to let that be his final dance. He can't do it.

It's the right choice to make. He knows that as the Dalek Emperor looks smugly on, as the blue-green ball of the Earth glows with radioactive fire from above, as everything prepares to end. Responsibility is just like having a cat. Sometimes the best choices aren't the easy ones. Sometimes they're the ones that hurt like Hell. But that doesn't make them any less right.

Life will go on. Somehow, in some fashion, life will go on. There was a universe before the Daleks, and there will be a universe after the Daleks. A universe where women with bark for skin grow in stately forests, where rogues wander the timestream playing stupid little cons, where people live, and die, and dance, and have their hearts broken, and lift each other up, and force each other down. Life always goes on. It's arrogant to think that it could do anything else.

He closes his eyes, and thinks of Susan. He always wanted better for her than whatever it was she had; nothing could be good enough for his granddaughter, his flesh and blood, his little bit of forever. He thinks she was happy. She always seemed to be, at least, when she wasn't joining in the typical young-girl occupations of screaming, running, complaining, and whinging about the things he hadn't gotten for her. She's gone now, of course, just like all the others--gone to dust, and maybe never anything at all, it's so hard to tell, with the timestream as bent and tangled as it's become--but he remembers her. He remembers all of them.

Sarah Jane, with her weak ankles and her impossible attraction to whatever he most wanted her to avoid.

Peri, with her sharp little gestures and her crisp little frowns, who saw him at his worst. He's still sorry for that. It wasn't like he had a choice.

Nyssa and Adric, just children, but so stupidly, stupidly selfless. Just a few more that he couldn't save, for all that Nyssa died a long time after he left her. He left crystal flowers on her grave, lilies that would never die.

Leela, cavegirl supreme, the future fallen back into the past and then climbing back up again to travel into the future, all spitty savagery and mistrust, all wisdom and potential.

And Ace, his Ace, sweet, mad Ace...sometimes he feels like his time with her is part of what made him become who he became, after he lost her Professor in the inevitable flux of time. He can hear her now, that petulant, carbon-hard voice, asking, "Nitro nine, Doctor?" Back then, he counseled caution, forbade her half the explosions she wanted to create. Now, though, he'd cry "Brilliant!" and run with her ahead of the flames, hand-in-hand, grinning as broadly as she was.

He's loved them all, the ones that danced with him, the ones that stood aside, all of them, even the ones who didn't stay, the ones who didn't mean to come, the ones who hurt him...all of them. How could he do anything but love them? They've been all he had, and now they're gone, not a one of them living in this time and place, not even Jack, one floor below and blown out just like a candle. Jack be nimble, Jack be quick...but it's over. He's loved them, and he still loves them, and he misses them all. Even Rose is dead now, dust for twenty thousand years. Everything dies.

It's time.

*

"EX-TER-MINATE."

"Yeah, I kind of figured."

Jack closes his eyes, spreads his arms, and smiles.

Ladies and gentlemen, good-night.

*

_I'm sorry, love, I'm sorry, but you know the story doesn't end this way._

He hears the TARDIS, and he knows. How could she? How could she be so foolish--how could the TARDIS _allow_ her to be so foolish? How could it...

Unless this was what it wanted all along.

_Once upon a time is not a blessing, not a curse; it's a prophecy, an invocation of what's to come. We aren't finished here, Doctor. We may never be finished here. There's work to do._

Rose is glowing from within, glowing with all time the universe has to offer. It's the same glow he's seen behind his own eyelids, that he saw racing under Romana's skin, growing stronger by the day in Susan and in Ace. She's changed herself. She doesn't know it yet, but she has; this is a step as irrevocable as learning to feel the world falling away. She's still Rose Tyler, but she'll never be a daughter of the Earth again. The tears on her cheeks are still seasalt and sorrow, but they're Gallifrey's oceans, now, claimed forever by the tides of time.

_Will you forgive me when this kills you? Her skin can bear me for a while, for she has so little of me in her, but you..._

Life and death and life again; beginnings and endings, like moments, flaring firefly-bright around him. She's a goddess, she's all of time and more, and this can't last. There are reasons that the Time Lords never sought to be anything more divine than what they were.

"Let it go, Rose," he says, and he knows she won't, but oh, she is beautiful, standing there on fire, every Time Lady that ever walked reborn, for an instant, in her skin. He sees Romana in her face, more clear than ever, he sees Ace, he sees them all, even the ones he hasn't known yet, the ones that haven't come..."Let it go." _I'll forgive you. I'll always forgive you. Just let her go, please; I didn't send her away so you could kill her._

"...my head."

"I think you need a Doctor," he says, and he's grinning through his suicide, grinning as he pulls her in his arms and takes in another stray, kisses her deeply, tastes the twenty-first century on her breath, and feels himself begin to die. Humans hold so little time. It's like arsenic; a little bit won't kill you, but it builds in your tissues. Time Lords, especially Time Lords nine hundred years old and full of foolish pride, well...

Overdose of eternity. That's a cause of death for the record books.

_I'm sorry._

_I know,_ he replies, and takes Rose in his arms, like a bridegroom carrying his bride, like a doctor carrying his patient, like a father carrying a child; he takes her in his arms, and carries her home.

*

"...there are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea is getting cold. Come on, Ace. We've got work to do."

It's always beginning again.


End file.
